Tempus: it seems we’ve been here before

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Any nervousness over further bad news from Smiths Group’s detection
business is understandable. This makes sensors used at airports and
elsewhere to detect explosives, weapons and other undesirables — one of five
divisions in this diversified engineer, accounting for a bit less than a
fifth of revenues.

It was the detection side that was the subject of an earlier nasty profit
warning in May 2011. The aftermath saw the shares trading at below £9 at one
stage; they had been above £14 amid suggestions that the group would be
broken up.

It is understandable that the construction of an air-polluting,
noise-blighting £22 billion third runway to turn Heathrow into the world’s
pre-eminent superhub caught the eye, but the Davies report into airport
expansion also made another radical suggestion: that — third runway or not —
Heathrow should start acting like the UK hub that it pretends to be